An attempt to hasten the death of the electronic’in electronic literature ’“ to re-cognize it as a dead metaphor “ becomes an agonistic meditation on my generation’s anticipation of the death of literature itself, with the literary,’potentially, waiting in the wings.

Affordances of digital technology apply not only to processes of literary writing, production of digital documents and digitization of texts written or printed on paper, but also to the preservation of writers’archives. Without addressing the transformations caused by electronic writing, this article considers the challenges and also the benefits of digitizing texts written in fragile materials which, for that reason, cannot be handled frequently. This is the case of the writers’archives housed in the Arquivo da Cultura Portuguesa contempornea da Biblioteca Nacional [Archive of Contemporary Portuguese Culture at the National Library], and which, after digitization, have become part of the Biblioteca Nacional Digital [Digital National Library]. This paper addresses methodological questions related to the policy of collecting writers’archives when combined with the tools and work processes of the digital medium.

A number of epistemological assumptions of quantum theory in its approach to the natural world (virtuality/actuality, interaction observer/ observed, unpredictability and statistical causality, wave-particle duality, the notion of information, etc.) are surprisingly close to the properties shown by the new digital textualities born with the computer age, and here generically referred as «cybertext». The purpose of this paper is to explore a connection between the quantum model and the semiotic model, not so much to reveal a simple homology, but rather to suggest a unified vision underlying the approach to the various levels of reality (material, biological, mental, cultural, and spiritual). This connection between the quantum view of matter and cybertext is terminally focused on unifying the triadic concepts of matter/energy/information with the key concepts of the semiotic triangle signifier/signified/meaning (or, in the domain of aesthetics, TAC: technology/art/consciousness).

Cet article insiste tout d’abord sur l’importance que prennent les concepts de technotexte et d’intermedia en poésie contemporaine. Le rôle de l’ordinateur est alors envisagé dans ce cadre. On montre que le medium numérique instaure une nouvelle situation de communication en redéfinissant le rôle du lecteur. Cette situation est examinée dans le cadre d’un nouveau modèle dénommé «modèle procédural de la communication». Deux particularités du médium numérique décrites dans ce modèle, à savoir le fossé sémiotique et la capacité processuelle, permettent d’introduire une nouvelle catégorie de signes, les signes performatifs, ainsi que de nouveaux niveaux esthétiques qui présentent des propriétés spécifiques de lisibilité. Il est alors nécessaire de prendre en compte une nouvelle fonction de la réception, la méta-lecture, pour expliquer l’intentionnalité esthétique de ces niveaux. On en conclut qu’il est alors intéressant d’explorer le concept de formes programmées pour aborder ces niveaux.

In this paper we set out to reflect on the (re)configuration of the classical notion of Literature and literary fiction in light of the evolution of technologies, to the rise and consequent development of the videoludic industry and digital games. Does the change in the material nature of the medium, in this case from paper and book to computer or television screen(s), change or maintain the possibility that, in some cases, according to a certain kind of narrative and of ludological genre, we can still talk of fiction and Literature? To what extent does the algorithmic (im)materiality, by dematerializing and virtualizing content in a different manner than the book “ notwithstanding the fact that, as it takes shape in e-texts, hypertexts and cybertexts, it also changes literacy as well as authorship, emission and reception “ preserve or change that which has so far been called Literature? Are we on the same level of change as that which happened at the time when orality was fixed by writing, in other words, at the time of the very rise of the paradoxical (and contradictory, in its terms) «oral literature»?

Eric Chevillard has built a successful career in the world of printed books. He also keeps a blog, called L’autofictif (http://l-autofictif.over-blog.com/). Two main questions arise from this coexistence of print and digital forms. The first is related to the contrast between features of blog texts and paper texts. On the blog, writing is organised in shorter and sharper fragments, and subjects become more personal. The second question arises from the relationship between L’autofictif, digital text, and L’autofictif, printed book, since Chevillard also publishes his blog texts on paper. Each of these forms sustains different reading experiences. The reader of the online work deals with a text in constant mutation, which is accessible in fragments, and in a random order. In the printed book, the text is organized according to a chronological sequence and is perceived as a whole.

Reader-response theory tried to direct the spotlight away from the text and the author, recognising that the most important element in the act of reading was the reader. However, theorists have always had their problems, not with the theoretical assumptions, but with the empirical evidence. If the reader does not make his/her reaction public, it is impossible to determine the way any text acts upon him/her. The emergence of digital media has enabled readers to publicly react to a text and engage in a dialog with its author, who serves as a mediator. This article looks at how a reader reacts to a blog text, through the comments s/he makes and the dialogues s/he establishes. It also attempts to show that digital media should not be confined to the disciplines of media studies or cultural studies, and that certain theoretical assumptions of literary studies can and should be rethought in light of new media practices.  

This study is an attempt to articulate the concepts of imagetext and ekphrasis (Mitchell, 1994) with the idea of hypertext (Bolter, 2001). In this essay, ekphrasis is conceived not only as a visual description of an artistic object, but rather as a pictorial movement “ mainly linguistic “ which has consequences for the development of reading, literature, and literacy (cf. Mitchell, 1994: 193). According to Jay David Bolter, hypertext is a textual space conceived as a result of an act of remediation of print which includes an electronic device “ a link “ equivalent to another typographical mechanism: the footnote in a book, used for hundreds of years (Bolter, 2001: 27). Considering the book Em demanda de Moura / Giraldomachias (Moura e Castello-Lopes, 2000) as the main (but not the exclusive) object of this analysis, in the present essay I try to investigate how verbal and visual language connect with each other and how their interplay is both ekphrastic and hypertextual, since all poems of this book are constructed as multi-sequential, non-linear, spatialized, verbal and visual artifacts.

In Inquérito à s Quatro Confidências (1996), Maria Gabriela Llansol decides to renounce blessing. Half a century before (1942), in a letter to her friend priest Joseph-Marie Perrin, Simone Weil refuses baptism in order to remain faithful to spiritual experiences the Church condemns. Why is it that silence and the denial of blessing are sometimes the only possible place for writing and thought? Why is it necessary to choose danger and find oneself in the gaze of the other?